Everyone has something to say, whether they say it in words or something visual.
I want to produce my own culture. I don't want to be entertained.
Anyone who has an idea can do this. It's cheap, it's easy to do.
People feel that they don't have a voice. People are being spoken to and not being allowed to speak for themselves.
It's non-commercial in a world where most media is commercial. It's non-professional.
It's amateur in a world where most people are professional creators.
The primary ethic of zendom is do it yourself.
Quite literally what it is, is it's a pamphlet. It's usually made at 8.5 by 11 paper, something like this.
Fold it over twice and handwritten, sometimes just typed out, cut and paste.
It's a very personal touch when you're looking at something where the text is off-center, it's tilted, it's got finger prints, smudgy finger prints from the kid who was doing it.
On the paper with ink and typos and what-and-that.
That gives one very specific feeling of personality.
I can see that a human with very bad spelling put the zine together.
They all share one thing, which is they're about someone sort of being authentic to themselves and being authentic to what they are trying to communicate.
Even if it's something silly like their love for eight-track tapes or pest dispensers or something profound about their dislike for capitalism,
their dislike for consumer society, their hatred of patriarchy, it's about them.
It's not about an ideology necessarily, it's not about a dogma, it's not about a target market which is trying to be exploited.
You're not writing for someone else, you're really writing for yourself.
I don't have any shame in saying I'm a total feminist and I talk about those kind of issues that I find important.
I talk about being a mixed Asian, having different races and identifying with them and that being very important to me and having an identity.
Especially if you're a person of color and your voice is not being heard and especially for Asians who usually don't say much because I'm still fighting against my own conditioning.
You know, of being a young Asian girl who's been brought up to be preened for beauty pageants or something like that.
You know, especially in the Filipino circles. You know, it's something I'm still fighting against.
So it's kind of like helping each other break the conditioning we've had.
One of the problems in this culture is everything becomes instrumental.
Everything is about a means to an end and most often that end is profit.
If everything being a means to an end, sometimes we forget, you lose touch with that sort of doing the thing itself.
And what Zions are at their best, although they've changed in the past 15 years or so, is that they're really about an end in themselves.
It's about the act of creation and the act of communication and the community that comes from that act of communication and sharing.
There's not that many things in our world which you can control yourself.
When you see, you know, what you think of in print on a piece of paper, even though it's just like a Xerox copy,
it becomes like truth or it becomes valid, you know.
And, you know, you read all these things like Vogue and other mainstream publications or magazines and, you know, they have a certain kind of truth to them.
But when you read your magazine or whatever you want to call it or Zien, then that truth becomes valid, you know, just because it's in print.
It wasn't really meant to be, like, widely distributed. It was just me, like, ranting.
But then when I got a lot of feedback of women saying, you know, I identify with a lot of those things and I haven't read it anywhere else
and I'm so glad that something like this is out.
I see Zien as subverting commodities, the whole culture of commodification, that everything is something that's produced
and then withheld from those who want it or dangled in front of them for the purchase price. You can have it if...
I started with my Zien at my corporate job because I hated them so much and I stole, like, their office supplies
and I used to have, like, me and my girlfriend used to have, like, copy parties where she would come, like, late at night to my day job
where I would still be sitting around pretending like I had something to do and everyone was gone
and we would, like, make thousands of runs of our Zien.
I kind of look at Ziens as more of a potlatch sort of thing. You pass it on as a gift.
My form of distribution, for example, for myself, with my own Zien, I'll basically give them to everyone that I meet.
I'll walk down the street handing them to people. I'll also take a box of them sometimes and walk to the park
and just throw them out in the grass and walk away and people who are laying in the grass, like, litter comes blowing across them
and they're like, whoa, what's this? Wow, it's a Zien. So it's kind of like a gift that they found.
Music
The No Real Zien Library is kind of an evolving project. Right now it's the No Real Zien Library,
but in the future, ultimately, it will be the Zien Library slash Small Press Resource Center,
which will involve the capability, tools, copy machines and things like that
to let people come in here and make their own Ziens on the spot.
When you're talking about communication, you're talking about often trying to reach people that aren't part of your subculture.
Problem with Ziens, of course, is that there's so much about the individual. There's so much about the subculture that they're insular.
This neighborhood, there's a lot of single-parent families. There's a lot of families struggling with keeping their kids off drugs
and out of a gang or in school or whatnot. I don't know of what value or of what use Zien culture could be.
I see it as having a lot of value, but in the practical reality, I think people might be just too busy trying to survive.
Have you heard of a phenomenon called Ziens?
No, I don't know anything about it.
Ziens, no.
Zien means spirit in our country, in Bengali. Zien is kind of like evil and good.
I've never heard of anything called Ziens. Oh yeah, this is nice.
So it's like a mini magazine, right? Yeah, this will work.
It's not going to be convenient on my own to put it into the library, too.
Music
Wallpaper paste.
Activist friend.
When we go on wheat paste, we take a bucket of mixed-up wallpaper paste or wheat paste, a wide wallpapering brush.
All this stuff is really an expensive plastic bucket.
You wear clothes that are not your favorite clothes and are machine-washable because you will give the stuff all over you.
I don't have any condensed milk. I know that really makes it stick better.
When I was in Chicago, we had big arguments and meetings about using condensed milk, pro and con, because a lot of us are vegan.
My argument was that our oppressed cow sisters would want to help us out in our struggle, but nobody else bought that one.
So we generally did not use condensed milk, but condensed milk added to wallpaper paste.
When the stuff dries, it's like cement.
Sister Serpents is a collective of women who make political art and post it on the streets.
Sister Serpents started in 1988. It was started by two women who were artists in Chicago.
It was in response to the really, really oppressive political climate of the time.
Music
The pros and cons of this form of media, the good thing about it is that anyone can do it.
Anyone who has an idea can do this. It's cheap. It's easy to do.
If you see something in the newspaper that's bothering you, take a pair of scissors and cut out a picture and say something about it,
and put it on a piece of paper and take it to a coffee shop and you can put your opinion out on the street.
Music
It's not elitist art. It's not hidden away in galleries. It's not locked up in museums,
and it's putting a political message on the street where a lot of different kinds of people will see it.
It cuts across class lines and color lines. It's just anybody walking by that corner is going to see it.
Music
We want women to walk by our work and look at it and think,
wow, I never thought about that. We're hoping that people will think about things more when they see our work,
and it'll start conversation even if it makes people angry, if it upsets people. It's better than them not thinking about things at all.
Music
A lot of what we're reacting to is the way that issues that are important to us are portrayed inaccurately by the media,
and the way almost any news is portrayed inaccurately by the media.
And so this is our way of getting our opinion, our idea of how these events really happen out.
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I think that the law that makes wheat pasting and posturing illegal is a fundamental violation of First Amendment constitutional rights.
It prevents people who may have no other means of communicating from communicating.
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The way I was introduced to graffiti, growing up when we were younger, you had breakdancing or b-boying, whatever you choose to call it,
DJing or MCing and then you had the graph, people who were out there bombing. One day I was riding the subway and I got out of the subway car
and the doors closed and it was like this huge top to bottom character with colors on the subway and I was like,
whoa, that's it, that was it, it was over. That's what I wanted to do. I said, that's what I want to do.
Back then we couldn't afford supplies, so obviously we would have to go and boost paint, whatever, shoplift, call it what you want,
but that's how strong we felt about our art form. Regardless of what obstacles we put against us, we were going to do it.
We would climb fences, jump rooftops, run across highways, whatever it took, but we were going to get our name up.
I think kids out here, young people, they look for a kind of fame, a kind of fame that they can't get through mainstream.
So they develop a society of taggers, people that tag, and then you'll find somebody, I know a boy named who tags Jace,
and he'll try to tag all over the place, so they'll develop their own society of who gets the most fame.
And I think in the process you'll find people who take that to another level and start doing pieces.
We paint at 7 o'clock in the PM and by 5 o'clock in the morning we're done, so people are going to work, they'll be like,
wow, what happened here? There's something new, so they get really surprised and they get happy.
Now they see something really nice for them, something that they can relate with,
because what we try to do is paint whatever we see in the community.
One of the things that I've used at my work also as a way, like this neighborhood is becoming more and more mixed.
It used to be a predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood, now there are a lot of Mexicans here,
there are more Dominicans moving in, but I used to artwork as a way to bring these different groups together.
You heard Selena? Selena is a Mexican singer, I painted a portrait of her and Emiliano Zapata as a way to welcome them into the neighborhood,
because you'll find a lot of people resent them and their culture and the way they live,
but since then I have a good relation with the Mexicans, so it's a way to connect yourself to everybody.
I put different people up in the neighborhood that I find interesting, that look interesting,
or that kind of describe, I think, the culture of the neighborhood.
This guy right here with the Puerto Rican flag, he's a Puerto Rican revolutionary.
His name is Pedro Alviso Campos, and he was the first Puerto Rican to graduate from Harvard,
and he went to Puerto Rico to try to make Puerto Rico a free island.
So I put up his images a few times throughout the neighborhood as a way to share with people who he was,
because some kids will ask me, who's that? Is he like some kind of poet or art or something?
And I'll explain to them, and then other people will ask me, and I'll tell them, you explain to them who that is.
And sometimes when I put up some of these images, people are bothered by them, like Malcolm X.
When I first did Malcolm X, some Puerto Rican guy came up to me and said,
why are you putting up a black guy in his neighborhood? This is Spanish Harlem.
But at first that bothered me, but I think that's what it's about.
People voicing how they really feel.
What I do first is I find an image that I want to work with, and in this case I chose the one of my sister,
and I'll get a piece of oak tag or some kind of strong paper, and I'll make a quick sketch of the person.
And what I've done here is I've broken down her figure into like basically three different shapes,
four different shapes, her dress here, her face, her hair, and her arm.
And what I do is there's another piece for the face and the arm, and I can spray them on later.
But I just lay the piece against the wall.
I carve these things out with a mat knife, some kind of blade.
Simple spray cans, I'll pay the dollar for these.
The cool thing about it is that, how long did that take me? Two minutes?
Yeah.
And then I can put it up all over.
What it offers to the communities is that the kids in the community have something else to do than to stand outside,
you know, just hanging around tossing nothing because that usually leads to trouble when you don't have anything to do.
This is something that they're interested, it keeps them off the street for whatever little time they're in here,
you know, they're in here, they're enjoying themselves, they're safe, you know, they're drawing, they're doing what they like,
and you know, nobody's telling them it's wrong, what you're doing, you know, they're wearing coverages
to express themselves through their art.
And I mean, we don't call anybody and tell them, listen, come down to class, they show up on their own,
they don't want to come, they don't come, but they're usually here, they bring their friends, other people come.
We have kids that travel from Brooklyn, you know, an hour and a half just to come here for three hours, you know,
and I was surprised when they first asked us to do these classes.
I didn't think that, you know, there was so much of an interest for this, but it turns out, you know, I'm glad that this is probably one of the best things we've ever done.
We try to, like, put ourselves in the position of these new kids that are coming up now and watching the stuff that we're doing,
because you gotta remember that when we first started, there were no programs that catered to this art form,
and there was no one that we can go to and say, listen, you know, this is what I like.
You know, everybody else, you know, all the adults were sort of like looking at this and saying, well, there's nothing that will ever come of that.
You know what I mean? And now, you know, that we have the opportunity to reverse that, you know, we're doing something about it.
It's a silent way of fighting against the negative things in the block, in the area, you know?
Like, on my block, they sell drugs, and sometimes, like, having a positive presence on the block, like, it's like a silent war against those things, you know?
Rather than saying, get the hell out of the block, or we hate the fact that you guys sell drugs in the block.
And kids can go either way, you know? They can choose to follow something positive, or they can choose to, like, make easy money on the streets.
More and more, all you see on the streets are corporate advertising, and you see less and less of people selling artwork or ideas.
They're promoting a product, you know? And I guess, like, I wouldn't hesitate to paint on top of something like that, you know?
Because I just think, like, if it comes from outside into this neighborhood, then we have the right in this neighborhood to say that doesn't belong here, you know?
That need to communicate still just bubbles up and always gets crushed and brought up and sold out, but still, it comes back up.
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Thank you.
